NASA: Red Planet looks a little gray inside

Feb. 21, 2013
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This image from NASA's Curiosity rover shows the first sample of powdered rock extracted by the rover's drill. The image has been white-balanced to show what the sample would look like if it were on Earth. / NASA/JPL-Caltech/MSSS

by Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

by Dan Vergano, USA TODAY

NASA's Curiosity rover has completed its first drilling operation on Mars, mission scientists confirmed on Wednesday.

And they report things look a little gray inside the the Red Planet.

The $2.5 billion rover landed on Mars in August, and has now completed test runs of its major instruments, intended to look for chemistry indicating past, or present, habitable conditions on Mars. The drill aboard the rover bore into the flat bedrock on Feb. 8, at a location nicknamed "John Klein," piercing some 2.5 inches deep into rock.

"This is the first time any robot has drilled into a rock on another planet," says mission sample chief Louise Jandura of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, Calif. "The drill allows us to get beyond the surface layer of rocks into the material inside, a sort of time capsule of the last 3 billion years there."

While the sample awaits chemical analysis, it appears distinctly different in color from the ubiquitous rusty dust that coats the Red Planet's surface.

"We're seeing a new color for Mars and it's kind of exciting," says JPL's Joel Hurowitz. The color of the rock sample, and calcium veins lining cracks in the bedrock point to a wet environment that laid down layers of sedimentary rock inside Gale Crater in the distant past. On the rover's mission over the next two years, the drill will help answer questions about whether carbon-based organic chemicals essential to biochemistry linger in the ancient rocks of Mars.

"All of this will help add up to whether or not this was a habitable environment once," says rover mission chief John Grotzinger of Caltech..